The only similarity between Robert Pattinson’s work in “Twilight” and his new film “The Rover”? The screaming fans who still appeared as he walked the red carpet in Los Angeles on Thursday at the U.S. premiere of the Australian indie movie.
“It’s always distracting when that happens,”“Rover” director David Michôd said in a rare lull of silence outside the Regency Bruin Theatre.
Before casting Pattinson in “The Rover” – the director’s second film (the first was 2010’s “Animal Kingdom”) — Michôd said he wasn’t versed in Pattinson’s vampire period.
“I was pretty much totally unfamiliar with his work, but I had had a meeting with him before I even know I was going to make “The Rover” and really liked him,” Michôd said. “I found his physical energy really kind of beguiling and he was really sort of emotionally available, so I really wanted to sort of see what he could do. And, he just knocked my little socks off to the extent that me and my casting director turned to each other once he left the room and went, ‘Well, OK, that’s done, right?’”
That meeting eventually led to Michôd casting Pattinson in his new movie, which features the star and Guy Pearce as an unlikely duo who embark on a quest across a post-apocalyptic landscape. Pattinson trades glittering skin and perfectly coiffed hair for open wounds and a shoddy buzz cut.
“It’s just so kind of stark, and it was just so different,” Pattinson said of the material. “Something just spoke to me in it, and I really don’t know quite what it was.”
He added, “If these scripts came along once every six months, I would do them every single time. But they just don’t.”
Pearce noted that he “saw a transformation before Day 1, really,” and Liz Watts, one of the film’s producers, said she believed the team ethos helped Pattinson hone the character.
The actor, she said, “came to the outback and put up with flies and heat and dust and all the rest.” (Pattinson has praised the isolated location of the film for helping him focus on the role.)
There was a different vibe in Westwood on Thursday night, the screaming fans a reminder of Pattinson’s more typical moviemaking experience.
Clutching a three-foot rendering of Pattinson’s scruffy face, Nancy Cambino, 47, said she traveled from her native Long Island, N.Y., to see Pattinson at “The Rover” premiere. She became a fan during his “Twilight” days, and has met him multiple times. But it’s not “Twilight” that keeps her holding her Pattinson cutout.
“I actually don’t like ‘Twilight.’ I never did,” Cambino said. “I’m a Rob fan, not a ‘Twilight’ fan. I saw ‘Twilight’ and I went, ‘Oh, I like this guy,’ and I went to watch all his other movies and I like them much better.”
Cambino said she already had her ticket to see “The Rover” that night at a public screening, eagerly pointing to the words on her Pattinson poster below the movie’s title.
“A career-defining role. That’s what it’s all about,” she said.
New still of Guy Pearce & Robert Pattinson from ‘The Rover’
And Rob talks about ‘The Rover’ script in an interview with Associated Press from Cannes (click to read the full interview – about David Michôd)
The director’s rising star also attracted Twilight actor Pattinson, who has often played cool characters that trade on his severe looks. But in The Rover, he’s received the best reviews of his career for playing a fidgeting, bloodied misfit with a stuttering Southern accent.
‘‘There was something about the speech pattern,’’ Pattinson says. ‘‘When you’re reading something, it’s very rare that you actually want to say it out loud. As soon as I started reading this, it was just a fun voice.
‘‘You become really annoying and run into the other room: ‘Listen to this!’ And they say, ‘What are you talking about? I can’t understand anything you’re saying’.’’
How much is the Pattinson character derived from John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”?
You set up a relationship like this, somewhere in the back of your mind you’re thinking it’s Steinbeck. But one thing that appealed to me was being able to make something lean and muscular and elemental. And that basic relationship between a seemingly loveless murderously embittered man and an open naive simple boy was for me the perfect prism for that elemental story.
Why was Pattinson the right casting?
One thing that was clear to me when I was testing people, and Rob already knew it, was that there were 100 different ways you could play this character, differing degrees of mental problems– just uneducated, developmentally slow.
He’s a good gunslinger.
One of the key reasons for that scene telling Guy when he was a kid on the farm and his neighbors was to make it clear that he has a rich imaginative life, he’s not an idiot, he’s looking for someone to love. Guy realizes too late that’s what he’s looking for too. Rob gave me a character who felt plausibly simple without having to push it too far into the mentally disabled world. He was totally open and engaged. That’s why I had a feeing he was going to be my favorite, when I met him. Even thinking about the bubble Pattinson is forced to live in, I was taken aback by how wonderfully open and engaged he was when I met him as a stranger.
The Twilight movies were clearly a huge blessing for Robert Pattinson, but also somewhat of a curse: The 28-year-old Brit has been working overtime to break out of the pin-up mold, gravitating toward edgy indies like David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis and this week’s The Rover, directed by Animal Kingdom filmmaker David Michôd. The sometimes brutally violent film features Pattinson as a left-for-dead “half-wit” who joins a vengeful Guy Pearce’s as they travel across a rural, post-apocalyptic Australia. The very candid Pattinson talked to us about getting down-and-dirty for the role, his strategy for keeping photographers away, and what artist has reignited his love for hip-hop.
The screams of teenage girls could be heard for miles as Robert Pattinson hit the Los Angeles Regency Bruin Theatre on Thursday night at the U.S. premiere of The Rover.
The British star, donned in a navy blue Alexander McQueen suit, hit the red carpet with writer and director David Michod, producers David Linde and Liz Watts, and costar Guy Pearce for the film’s Los Angeles debut.
Made famous for his leading role in the Twilight saga, the actor told The Hollywood Reporter that he is not confining his career to a specific genre. “I’m not really trying to break out of anything. I feel like every single movie I’ve done is part of the same road. I’m not trying to distance myself of anything particularly,” Pattinson said. “I just hope people like [the film].”
Set a decade following a global economic depression, The Rover tells the story of Eric (Pearce), who relentlessly pursues a brutal gang in the Australian outback that steal his car: his only remaining possession. Left abandoned by his brother and fellow gang members, Rey (Pattinson) is forced to guide Eric in tracking down the brutal clan.
“To be honest, [The Rover] did come to me from a place of anger, when it was a despair and anger that I was feeling about the state of the world today,” Michod explained. “The movie is set a few decades in the future, but it isn’t set for post apocalypse. Michod wanted the evils showcased in the film to be “directly connected” and representative of the wrongs seen and experienced in “the world today.”
While filming, the cast and crew endured extreme heat (just over 110 degrees), rain storms and outback flies, which are apparent throughout the movie. “It always helps to be in real locations,” Pearce said. “That extreme heat, those flies, and that vast expanse of desert — it just adds to it, like you’re putting on a costume. It takes you there.”
Though each role was a deciding factor in choosing to partake in the project, both Pearce and Pattinson remarked that Michod’s directorship was ultimately why they committed to the film. “It wasn’t the role that drew me to the film. It was the script and David that drew me to the film…this time it was really about David being the filmmaker that he is,”Pearce revealed. Pattinson also remarked: “I really like David a lot. I love Animal Kingdom…[the script] just seemed so different and original…it was a bit of a no brainer.”
Audiences can expect to see another set of Pattinsnon’s acting talents in gangster-type film Idol’s Eye alongside Robert De Niro out at the end of this year, which still comes as a surprise to him: “It sounds crazy for me to say…that’s something which I’ve wanted – which I think anyone — would want to do.”
Though the Rover star is seemingly normal and content with the simple things in life, including inflatable furniture, driving a 1989 BMW, and downsizing from a $6.27 million home to a rental, he is a man of mystery. “[I have] lots and lots of secrets, that will remain secrets forever.”
Following the premiere, an exclusive after party at the W Hotel in Westwood drew the likes of Neighbors star Zac Efron, Katy Perry and Michelle Rodriguez. Party-goers were served an assortment of appetizers including sliders, mini pigs in a blanket, chicken skewers and an array of desserts at a chocolate fondue bar.
After a starry premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Robert Pattinson, Guy Pearce and director David Michod brought “The Rover” to The Regency Bruin Thursday.
Michod told Variety that he hadn’t been familiar with Pattinson’s previous work. “Rob just came in and did a beautiful audition for me that was both vulnerable and completely alive,” he said.
“This proved that seeing him work with Guy Pearce and Scoot McNairy, we realize he’s a consummate actor,” added producer David Linde. “He’s in the ‘Twilight’ movies and people don’t think of him in this way, but as you see in this movie he’s the real deal.”
For Pattinson, he said his goal is to work with good, ambitious directors. “These roles just don’t come up that often,” he said. “A script like this is so rare, I mean, it’s in the top five scripts I’ve ever read.”
Pattinson plays Rey, a yellow-toothed, simple-minded man who is one of the last survivors in a world 10 years after an economic collapse.
“I like how my character was set up. It was just sort of two really dense dialogue heavy scenes in the midst of almost no dialogue, so it let you be pretty free to do anything with it,” said Pattinson.
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